Saturday, 8 November 2014

Chapter 1

The long nights seemed reluctant to abandon the city. For a few
hours each day a gray light of dawn or dusk filtered through the dirty
white cloud ceiling and spread over things like the dim reflection of a
distant glacier. Even the snow, which continued, to fall, lacked
brightness. This white, silent, weightless shroud stretched out to
infinity in time and space. By three o’clock it was already necessary to
light the lamps. Evening deepened the hues of ash, deep blue, and the
stubborn gray of old stones on the snow. Night took over, inexorable and
calm: unreal. In the darkness the delta resumed its geographical form.
Dark cliffs of stone broken off at right angles lined the frozen canals.
A sort of somber phosphorescence emanated from the broad river of ice.

Sometimes the north winds blowing in from Spitsbergen and farther
still – from Greenland perhaps, perhaps from the pole. across the Arctic
Ocean, Norway, and the White Sea – gusted across the bleak estuary of
the Neva. All at once the cold bit into the granite; the heavy fogs
which had come up from the south across the Baltic vanished and the
denuded stones, earth, and trees were instantly covered with crystals of
frost, each of which was a barely visible marvel composed of numbers,
lines of force, and whiteness. The night changed its aspect, shedding
its veils of unreality. The north star appeared, the constellations let
in the immensity of the world. The next day the bronze horsemen on their
stone pedestals, covered with silver powder, seemed to step out of a
strange carnival; from the tall granite columns of St Issac’s Cathedral
to its pediment peopled with saints and even to its massive gilded
cupola-all was covered with frost. The red granite façades and
embankments took on a tint of pink and white ash under this magnificent
cloak. The gardens, with their delicate filigree of branches, appeared
enchanted. This phantasmagoria delighted the eyes of people emerging
from their stuffy dwellings, just as millennia ago men dressed in pelts
emerged fearfully in wintertime from their warm caves full of good
animal stench.
Not a single light in whole quarters. Prehistoric gloom.
People slept in frozen dwellings where each habitable corner was like
a corner in an animal’s lair: the ancestral stench clung even to their
fur-lined cloaks which were never taken off or which they put on to go
into the next room, to pry up a few floor boards in order to keep the
fire going-to get a book-or to empty the night’s excretions at the end
of the corridor onto piles of excrement likewise covered by the lovely
frost whose every crystal was a marvel of purity. The cold entered
freely through broken windowpanes.

The city, crisscrossed by broad, straight arteries and winding
canals, surrounded by islands, cemeteries, and huge empty stations,
sprawled over the tip of a narrow gulf on the edge of a white solitude
...
but the nights, unreal or studded with constellations, reigned
implacable and calm, and during those nights alders armed with heavy
Mauser pistols, carrying fifty lovely pointed bullets, a flask of
brandy, four pounds of black brec4 twenty lumps of sugar, a well-forged
Danish passport, and a hundred dollars sewed into the lining of their
trousers, moved resolutely with long strides into that desel4 where
nothing urns worse than meeting another man;
and women clutching their children by the hand, old men, cowardly
men, all of them cringing against the great wind of the terror, deadlier
still than the polar blasts, likewise entered that desert of ice led by
traitors and spies, guided by hate and fear, sometimes hiding their
diamonds, like convicts their money, in the secret and obscene folds of
their flesh.

Seen from high above, from the red-starred airplane circling overhead
every morning, the Neva looked like a thin white snake darting two thin
blue tongues into the desert from its open mouth.
The half-empty slums were hungry. The factory chimneys no longer
smoked, and when by chance one started smoking the women, huddling in
their rags at the door of a communal store, watched that bizarre smoke
climb with bleak curiosity. “They’re repairing cannons. They get extra
rations ... – How much? How much? – four hundred grams of bread a day;
yeah; but its not for us; it’s only for them. We know who works in that
factory, the bastards ...”
Grimy red flags hung over the doors of old palaces, oxblood in color,
built by Master Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who delighted in
eighteenth-century Italian elegance with its gracious structures
beribboned like shepherdesses. They had been mansions of empresses’
favorites, of the conquerors of the Crimea and the Caucasus, of great
lords owning millions of souls, ignorant intriguing, and thieving nobles
whom the Secret Chancellery subjected to torture one day before exiling
them to the forests of the east. When guides from the Department of
Political Education explained to simple folk who had come to the capital
to attend government conferences that these palaces were the works of
the architect Rastrelli, the visitors quite naturally heard “the works
of one who was shot,” for in Russian rastrellanny means “shot.” The
palaces and mansions dating from Napoleonic times, mote austere, with
noble symmetrical pediments placed over mighty colonnades, bore the same
red rags over their doors. The different periods of the Empire had thus
marked the streets with imposing structures which might make you dream
at night of the tombs of the Pharaohs of a Theban dynasty. But the ashes
of this dynasty were still fresh in a bog in the Urals; and these
tombs, those of a regime to be sure, bore signs: R.C.P. (b). SECOND
DISTRICT COMMITTEE; R.F.S.S.R. PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT FOR PUBLIC
EDUCATION, ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATIONAL SERVICES FOR BACKWARD CHILDREN;
R.F.S.S.R. SCHOOL FOR RED COMMANDERS OF THE WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’
ARMY. People were working in these dead palaces – dead because they had
been conquered, uncrowned because they were no longer palaces. The
machine guns squatting in the vestibules often in the shadow of huge
stuffed bears who used to hold out frays for visiting cards, seemed like
beasts of steel, silent but ready to bite. The noisy clatter of
typewriters filled rooms designed for princely comfort; a coarse
conqueror, Comrade Ryjik, was sleeping with his boots on in an elegant
Louis XV room on the same divan where, eighteen months earlier, an old
epicurean of the august race of the Ruriks amused himself by staring
full of enchantment and despair at naked girls. Now this epicurean was
stretched, out someplace else, no one knew where, in an artillery range,
naked, with a bristly beard, and a hole clean through his head, under
two feet of trampled earth, four feet of snow, and the nameless weight
of eternity.

One flight up dossiers were filed in boudoirs which bad been divided
into offices by unpainted wood partitions; an odd collection of
requisitioned mattresses was laid out on the floors of the great
reception rooms, transforming them into dormitories. Huge crystal
chandeliers still tinkled weakly when trucks passed. Humbled captives,
who in the old days might well have climbed the marble staircases of
this very mansion with dignified steps under the impassive gaze of
liveried footmen, now waited in the cellar to be transferred to the
Special Commission. [1] Every once in a while the bored sentry sitting
elbows propped on a dirty table at the door to the cellar stairs would
get up, wearily shoulder the strap of his rifle, carried muzzle down,
and go to open the padlock of this prison.
“All right!” he would say, not unkindly. “Financiers to the crapper, three at a time!”
With familiar shoves, be herded the heavy stumbling forms down the
narrow corridor; they paused a moment at the sight of the dazzling snow
in the courtyard ... Snoring came from the former kitchens, where the
guardroom had been established.

Ryjik could no longer keep track of the time. His days had neither
beginning nor end. He slept whenever he could, by day, by night
sometimes at the beginnings of departmental committee meetings when the
speaker was long-winded. At such times be would doze off in his chair,
head thrown back, red-mustached mouth open; and his limp hands, draped
across his knees, expressed in their sudden stillness an enormous
weariness. For a long while the telephone – that bizarre little voice
designed to capture the eat, that voice that made you think of insects
scratching underground – had made him nervous and anxious. Now he
dictated and received orders over the phone and he copied down telephone
messages in his large schoolboy hand on the backs of cigarette boxes:
“Transmit to Committees of Three: Complete requisition of warm clothing
within twerty-four hours.” “Remove a barrel of herring from warehouse
12, cut back the men’s rations.” “Arrest the first ten hostages on the
list transmitted by the Committee of Five ...”
He listened, his eyes wandering, dazed from the days fatigue, in
front of the telephone table, dotted with the crumbs of black bread.
“Hello, Gorbunov? Get me Gorbunov. Is the raid over?” The shapeless
insect scratched away at the earth in its hole and somewhere far off an
unknown voice answered brutally: “Gorbunov has a bullet in the groin;
buzz off.” And the line went dead. Ryjik cursed. The bell rang again
with joyful urgency: “Hello? Is that you, Ryjik? The Saburov Theater is
giving away twenty tickets to The Little Chocolate Girl ...” The door
had creaked behind him, he sensed a comforting but vaguely irritating
presence: “Xenia?” “It’s me. Go to bed, Ryjik.” Xenia wore a grass-green
soldier’s tunic and steel-rimmed glasses; the holster of an automatic
hung from her belt. She was carrying a book Ryjik, in his great
weariness, dreamed of two soft firm globes of flesh and a warm mouth.
Xenia looked at him sedately: “Tomorrow at six. Department meeting.” He
blushed. “Okay Good night.” He went down the marble staircase. A kind of
senseless anger was brewing within him against this young woman who was
so simple and frank around him that her very presence banished the idea
that they could ever be, even for an instant face to face as man to
woman, disarmed by each other and abandoned to one another.

In the deserted library, next to the great Dutch earthenware stove,
two soldiers were playing chess in the glow of a candle. The chess board
was a mosaic of rare stones incrusted lit an elegant little stand; the
ivory men of Chinese design, fine-chiseled, detailed, and grotesque.
Ryjik leaned against the stove to let the heat penetrate him and closed
his eyes. What a job! And what if I’m tired of being strong after all?
What if ...? In these moments of extreme weariness he repeated three
unanswerable words to himself: “It is necessary.” His battery magically
recharged itself. This weariness was only the day’s fatigue: sleep could
dissipate it. The night reigned, magnificently silent over the snows,
the square, the city, the Revolution.
“Bushed, Ryjik?” asked one of the players, advancing a pawn. (He was a
dark little man with wisps of straw glistening in his unkempt overgrown
hair.) “Me too. Milk was up to twenty rubles in the market today. Sugar
was forty. I just got back from Gdov. It’s pretty, the countryl At
Matveevka, get this, a cominissar bad gone through requisitioning cows
and watches. The yokels nearly tore me to pieces. Our supply details are
pillaging, running away, or getting massacred. But I did run into some
decent guys with guts – from the wire factory ... They were sleeping in
the station to play it safe. They were smart.”
The other player coughed into a dirty handkerchief and said, without raising his small, craggy, hard head:
“I’ve had it. My wife covered sixty versts by rail and eighteen on
foot to get forty pounds of flour from the village. They confiscated
them all when she got back. Now she’s got a fever. It may well be
typhus. I can’t even put the kid into the children’s shelter, they’re
dying like flies ... Check ...”
“Gorbunov has a bullet in his groin,” said Ryjik.
“He’s a hustler,” replied the dark man casually. “I saw him
inventorying typewriters. He didn’t know the difference between
inventorying and requisitioning. He was making off with everything, even
cameras. I told him: ‘You’re a slob, we’ll never make a class-conscious
citizen out of you.’ All he knows is how to spout about world
revolution.”
Ryjik was warm now and murky second thoughts were stirring under his
brow, in those dark corners where we tirelessly, pitilessly repress a
strange multitude of desires, dreams, suspicions, violent impulses,
stifled joys, and curbed brutalities. He told the men curtly: “You:
stand guard at the prison from two o’clock until five; you: at the
door,” and went out. The icy night refreshed his face, but he didn’t
feel any better. People were standing watch in dark doorways in
accordance with the edict of the Executive. The night had become cloudy,
the snow no longer glistened: it was like walking through soft opaque
ashes which muffled the sound.
*
Around 3 A.M., at the moment when night is so vast, calm, and
profound it seems definitive, the telephone finally silent, Xenia, alone
in the great, parquet-floored hail of headquarters, was writing a few
lines on the back of a pass:
Revolution: Fire
Burn out the man of old. Burn yourself.
Man’s renewal by fire.
She held her twenty-year-old head in her hands as she sat pensive
over these lines. Regeneration of man through the red-hot iron. Plow up
the old earth, tear down the old structure. Recreate life anew. And in
all likelihood perish yourself. I will perish. Man will live. Yet still a
dull anxiety. Is that too the man of old resisting? Victory, smile into
the void: Very well, I’ll perish, I’m ready. “Ready.” She said it out
loud. The word came back to her from the silence and the limitless night
with a long inner echo. She didn’t sense that there was anyone behind
her.
Ryjik approached quietly, treading so lightly that the floor didn’t
creak under his suede boots; slightly stooped, brow hot hollow-eyed,
carrying a great simple decision within him. He placed his hand heavily
on the young woman’s shoulder. The warmth of that shoulder passed
instantly through all his nerves. To gain a few seconds, the infinity of
a few seconds, he asked:
“Writing, Xenia?”
“Oh, it’s you!”
Without any surprise, not even turning all the way around, she nodded at the lines she had just scrawled.
“Read it, Ryjik. And tell me if it’s all right.”
“Burn out the man of old. Burn ...”
Ryjik straightened up, totally subdued.
“All right? All right? I don’t know. I don’t like romanticism. Empty
phases. Everything is much simpler: Imperialism, class war,
dictatorship, proletarian consciousness ... See you tomorrow.”
He turned on his heels, a solid block. The leather thong of his Nagan
revolver slapped against his leg. He went through the black corridors
with the dogged step of a sleepwalker threw himself on his bed in the
dark, and passed out.
... That night only seven cars of food supplies arrived in the city.
(One was pillaged.) Forty suspects were arrested. Two men were shot in a
cellar.

Note
1. All-Russian Special Commission for the Suppression of
Counterrevolution and Sabotage, established December 1917 and best known
by its Russia acronym “Che-Ka” or Cheka. Replaced in February 1921 by
the G.P.U. or political police. – Trans.